Earlier this year, we marked Aqilla’s 17th birthday. Today we’re known as a cloud based accounting and business solution for mid-market and international organisations. We often talk about it being a Postmodern ERP solution. This means it links and automates admin and operational business components such as finance, purchasing, HR, distribution, and manufacturing. But it was quite a journey to get to this point, and it’s that journey I’d like to share with you here.
It seems like only yesterday that I decided to pack in my job and start a web based accounting & business systems company that included time sheeting and expense management. It wasn’t a decision that I took lightly. I’d held senior positions at Systems Union, Sage and Foundation Systems, so I was used to the security of corporate roles working for established companies. But from the first time I saw the potential of browser and web based software in operation, it struck a chord with me — and I knew we were onto something big.
Being web based and utilising the then-emerging agile and “lean” principles, it meant we had a faster development pace, giving us the potential to mature faster than many of the competing solutions at that time. It was very different from what the big corporates were doing in that space. I believed that if we worked hard and smart (and fast), we could catch them by surprise and overtake them.
Time to start talking about SaaS
It’s strange thinking back to those times now. Business broadband was starting to roll out, and a few brave organisations like Salesforce were testing the first subscription-based software models. We often talk about significant moments in art, history, politics or culture — where ideas that have bubbled below the surface explode into the mainstream. But we don’t always give the same dues to the tech sector and the pioneers who go on to change the way we experience the world.
I’m not comparing myself to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs here, but I will say there was that sense in the air that anything was possible, that the tech rulebook was ready to be ripped up. We believed that SaaS was key to this revolution and that it had the potential to bring genuine innovation to finance and accounting teams.
Buoyed by this enthusiasm, we decided to use web based software as the basis for a next-generation finance and accounting solution — something that would hopefully be cost-effective, easy and intuitive to use and free of the complexity associated with current offerings. This software was the first iteration of Aqilla as we know it today.
Although it felt like our moment, we still seemed to be spending a lot of time explaining the concept of SaaS to finance teams. We frequently needed to defend the advantages of dispensing with complex in-house servers and other hardware. We had to repeatedly justify why a service and subscription-based approach would work out more cost-effective and improve team efficiency. Remember, there were still people in that sector at that time who printed off their emails — or had their secretaries print off their emails — before drafting responses.
The dawn of Web 2.0
A change, however, was just around the corner in the form of Web 2.0. At that point, we shifted our market positioning and aimed our software squarely at a new generation of web-savvy finance professionals in mid-market companies.
These were people who had started using AOL, eBay, Yahoo!, and Amazon — and were enjoying the experience. They were comfortable navigating and interacting with browser-based services. And most importantly, from a SaaS adoption perspective, they liked the new cloud-based services offered by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook and used them to store their music, documents and photos at home.
Once we started talking to these people, we saw a new level of familiarity and trust in cloud technology and far less cynicism about taking a SaaS-based approach. For these reasons, our software immediately struck a chord with them, and they were ready to take a chance with the new kid on the block.
The market continued to mature and consolidate. Because of that, we found ourselves competing increasingly with higher-end players like NetSuite, Microsoft and Sage. It’s been a challenge at various points, but our agility and rapid product development cycles mean we more than hold our own.
For example, we were the first to deliver Making Tax Digital (MTD) functionality to the UK market within a cloud-based accounting solution. We were also the first to provide support for post-Brexit VAT requirements and offer Open Banking integration for businesses. Many of these firsts were possible because of advances in API technology and our ability to integrate with it. This will continue to be integral to how Aqilla develops in the future.
The secret of a successful business in 2023?
Celebrating 17 years is no small achievement. Many similar businesses that started out in our sector at the same time are no longer around. That’s not because they had bad products. But, to survive in our market, you must also structure your company so that there’s consistent financial support to help your product mature and evolve.
We invested sensibly in people, products and marketing without burning through cash as a lot of companies did around that time. Ours is still a relatively conservative business sector, and we must demonstrate our long-term customer commitment.
With that in mind, I’m delighted that two of our original software developers and technical directors still work here. We like to think that we provide a long-term career path for those who want to grow with us. This is so important — especially post-pandemic — as it’s increasingly difficult for graduates to get their first foot on the career ladder and receive essential mentoring.
Sustainability and social conscience
Aqilla is the result of wanting to create a fair, altruistic, and honest corporation. These are virtues that I hold in great esteem in my business and personal life. I wanted to take the best parts of the corporate philosophies that inspired me during my career and create a company for which the team and I would enjoy working.
Today, we’re proud to be an established and successful UK software company that powers some of the very biggest corporate names — and we’ve achieved this while staying true to the founding principles we set out all those years ago.
One of those founding principles was to create a more sustainable, greener way of doing business. This is received wisdom now, with everyone endorsing ESG, but that wasn’t the case when we started. We were amongst the first companies to use pure CRM and email-based communications. We’ve never printed outbound marketing materials and prefer offering high-quality, downloadable PDFs directly from our site. I like to tell people that we’ve never owned a filing cabinet in any of our offices — and this remains true today.
We work collaboratively on development and marketing, so we’ve cut the need to travel. Yet we still have employees with worldwide origins including Luxembourg, Ukraine, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Germany and (of course) the UK. We can fix most customer queries remotely without travelling to their offices. This also helps with responsiveness and efficiency — which ties back into the long-term financial security of the business. And it’s one of the reasons why we’ve avoided offering company cars to employees, another green initiative.
Conclusions
During the last seventeen years, it’s remained essential for financial teams to have a detailed knowledge of technical accounting so they can provide human oversight and review of all financial data. But, thanks to advances in SaaS and cloud based accounting and finance software, the mundane, repetitive tasks that traditionally took up so much time when we first founded Aqilla can be finally consigned to the past.
These advances are freeing up much-needed time and headspace — creating the right environment for finance teams to acquire new, valuable skills that support the wider business. As a result, the opportunity exists today for finance teams to extend their influence far beyond their current threshold and firmly position the department at the heart of business decision-making for many more years.
